Lexical Access Routes to Nouns in a Morphologically Rich Language

Abstract

Most current morphological processing models postulate two lexical access routes, full form and morpheme-based. We explored the nature of the morpheme-based route and its relation to the full-form route by studying recognition of written Finnish nouns. True case-inflection elicited a processing cost, confirming that such forms are recognized via the more demanding morpheme-based route. A processing cost was also observed for morphologically ambiguous nouns (BEARING versus BEAR+ING) and for pseudoambiguous nouns (PUNISH versus PUN(+)ISH). Neither pseudoinflections (BIA(+)S) nor embedded word-initial pseudostems (PET(+)ROL) evidenced processing costs. Our results suggest when the full form route is active, simultaneous activation of the morpheme-based route requires an opportunity for parsing the input string into a stem and a suffix. The pseudoambiguity effect suggests that the morpheme-based route does not test the morphophonological legality of the parsed string. The processing cost associated with morphologically ambiguous and pseudoambiguous nouns indicates that the relationship between the two routes is inhibitory.